Using Twitter makes you smarter say Irish scientists

Who says spending hours on the computer is bad for your mental health?

Not researchers at Trinity College Dublin, who just published their findings which showed that people who use social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are making themselves more intelligent in the process.

The Irish version of the “Sunday Times” in the U.K. reported that the researchers discovered a link between human social interaction and smartness. Those who interact more on a social level – even via the Internet – are also increasing their intelligence levels.

The “Times” says that the researchers – led by Trinity professor Andrew Jackson and a PhD student, Luke McNally – built a digital organism, a computer system with 50 to 100 neural networks, each of which represented a human brain with the ability to decide.

“We set up a computer model that takes in information about who did what to me the last time I met them,” said Jackson.

“What was the reward I got the last time I interacted with you as a person? I can store that as a memory . . . our model is absolutely analogous to the process of evolution and is analogous to a brain.”

One of the tests that the networks underwent was a game of a prisoner’s dilemma, with the scenario of two people being brought into a police station and charged with a crime.

The findings were published in the “Proceedings of the Royal Society B,” a biological science journal in London.